Car & Driver Says Prime Ugly, Too Slow

I drive 60 miles a day during the week, and work charging is a non-starter. The Prime will use more gas for me. Which increases the fuel costs because Pennsylvania has some of the highest gas taxes in the country.

The Volt will use more electric, but my local electric is mostly cleaner than the national average; sulfur dioxide is a little higher. Renewables can be better, but coal has dropped; it was around 30% when last I checked.
How clean is the electricity I use? - Power Profiler | Clean Energy | US EPA
The town is my power company; they even had their own plant once upon a time. This left them exempt from when Pa electric went open market, and they are PV friendly.

For long trips, we take a slowly rusting 2001 Sable that might be rated 25mpg on the current EPA. I think the Sonic will be fine for such with a hitch and cargo rack, but the wife disagrees. With 72k miles and the current rate of use, it will take 5 to 6 years for that car to see 100k miles. Annual fuel costs are only a little more than the insurance.

I buy cars, not companies. The Sonic had to go in for warranty work twice. The 2005 Prius once. The Toyota dealer had a free check up service on new cars, and they went ahead and did an oil change when I said not to. The Chevy dealer overfilled for motor oil on one of the 2 free oil changes they provide. Beyond that, both are equally annoying.

For a step down in class, the Sonic has extremely comfortable seats compared to the gen2's. My father has had a GM card for years, and that got another $3000 rebate on the Sonic. So looking at a Prius c was a non-starter then. But I'm also boycotting the Prius until one is made in NA.

 

I take you weren't in the EPA's focus groups. I understand they were the ones not happy with simply use a metric based Wh.

MPGe is just a conversion of a car's fuel economy to a rate in energy content, kWh in this case, and then related back to the energy content in a gallon of gasoline. Nothing more.

60mpge is horrible for an EV, I think the Coda was only BEV to be that bad, but it still uses less energy to go the same distance as the Prius.

 

Same question -- which is more "efficient" ?

 

Volt's extremely long recharge time using L1 isn't acknowledged.

To be practical, L2 is needed. That extra cost must be accounted for.

 

Why?
If a Prime can be fully charged in 5-1/2 hours, then why would the Volt's 10 hours be extra onerous?
Chevy says 10 Hours @ 12Amps....and that's without recharging at work.....presuming that you work for a company that would allow for it (mine does, I asked.)
You also have (according to the literature) the option to charge at 8 amps, which does take 16 hours....but the battery geeks out there might agree that if you have the time that slower charging might make sense.

It's never made walking around sense to me that L1 isn't practical.
Just inconvenient.

For me it would be valueless to install L2 charging if I were to get a PHEV, unless I knew in advance that I would be "upgrading(?)" to a BEV.

 

Only onerous if you don't have the time. One scenario e.g. would be that you get home from work and start charging from empty, and then take the car out in the evening. By the time you return home you do not have enough time to fill the battery by the morning.

 

It appears you question needs more qualifiers then.

I entered this part of the discussion to challenge the statement that MPGe was useless for comparing to MPG. That is actually main purpose. To show the energy efficiency of an alt fuel car, mainly electric, in comparison to all the other cars available for purchase, in a familiar format. MPG only shows the efficiency of the vehicle. Nothing upstream in the fuel's supply chain is considered, only from the pump onward. So MPGe is only from the wall outlet onwards.

Outside its intended purpose, MPGe can be misleading, but comparing energy efficiency of a 50mpg gas car to a 60mpge electric is its purpose.

If the buyer's attraction to the Prime is in part because of its better efficiency, they should be installing L2 since it means better charging efficiency.

There are 24 hours in a day, and most people work 8 hours a day. With 10 hours needed to charge, there is still 6 hours for the commute and going out in the evening. I think being out of the house for 14 hours on a weekday counts as a busy one.

 

Errr ... what ?

Choose the more efficient vehicle:
A: 50 mpg ICE
B: 60 MPGe EV

A one letter answer will be fine.
If it helps, 60 > 50.
You might wish to imagine yourself part of the focus group that advocated for gallons.

 

I answered the question when I first replied to it.
"60mpge is horrible for an EV, I think the Coda was only BEV to be that bad, but it still uses less energy to go the same distance as the Prius."

Then you re-asked the question.

60mpge uses less Watt hours of energy per mile than 50mpg. So the 60mpge car is more efficient. If this is not the correct answer, then you aren't using MPGe correctly.

 

Consider this exercise:

You start with one gallon of gasoline, and can run it in either your 50 MPG directly ... and drive 50 miles,
or you can turn it into electricity first and run it in your 60 MPGe vehicle.

Let's stipulate that both the ICE and power plant run at 35% efficiency, and there are no power losses between the electricity power plant and the battery. (Far from the truth -- I know. I want to make this exercise easy and glaringly obvious)

Correct me if I wrong, but I think 0.35 Ge will be consumed at 60 MPGe, and the EV will travel 21 miles.

In my world the 50 MPG ICE is much more efficient than the 60 MPGe EV, but that may be because I view efficiency as miles per unit fuel. I have no idea what efficiency you are talking about.

 

There it is.... it comes out finally. You're not being objective

 

Of course not, but then I didn't make the car cramped and ugly, or manufactured by a despicable company, or "supported" by a miserable dealership network, or of uncertain reliability.

No matter the angle I view Volt ownership, it does not hold a candle to competing choices. That is actually unusual. I expect cars to be better in some ways and worse in others.

 

I disagree, but it's going to vary from person to person.

The 10 - 16 hour recharge time would work fine for me. On my 30 mile round trip commute with no work charging (there's some chargers around but just for sake of argument) I would burn gas every day in a Prius Prime but the Volt should be fine to make that drive. I know enough about EVs to know you can't take anyone's electric range as gospel but let's just assume it is. Most days I get home at 4 PM and I'm not going to leave again until 6:30 the next morning, giving me 14 hours of charge time every night. That should be fine on a 120 circuit. If it were me and I was buying any electric car I would be springing for a L2 charger, but I don't think it's absolutely necessary. My only issue I think would be I want to use a L2 charger that I can plug into a standard 220 outlet and the ones I've seen appear to be a permanent install, which seems silly to me. Granted I haven't gone shopping for one but I just don't see it as a big deal, a real quick google search tells me they're between $300 and $700 so around $500, it isn't that big of a deal and I'd just install it myself. Now if for some reason I just bought a house that had a garage not wired for 220 or the box was full, well even without an EV I'm going to be dealing with that headache soon. I guess some of us use our garages as shops and others use them as storage sheds. To each their own.

 

Peak hours are the same for everyone. You want to avoid dinner time and early evening. Do we really want to promote plugging in during high-demand times? The lower electricity rates begin late in the evening. For my area, that's 11:00 pm. So, if you're trying to account for cost & time...

 

Cramped: Front seats were very nice in the first and second gen Volts I drove. It's been a bit but as I recall I liked the front seats better in the Volt. The rear seats though are just useless.

Ugly: pretty subjective, I liked the look of the fist gen Volt. The second one not so much but I don't find it offensive. It certainly looks better than a gen 1, 2, 3 Prius. I think the Gen 4 Prius and Prime look better though but not enough to sway me on that alone.

GM is despicable: Seems like a pretty harsh opinion. I have no reason to hate on GM. What's yours?

Poor support: I find GM dealers everywhere and in my life a GM dealer is almost always closer than a Toyota dealer. I am curious how many of those dealers have someone who would know what they're doing with the Volt though. Might be a valid concern, GM dealer in the middle of Wyoming, how many Volts do they ever see? But Toyota has sold so many Prius for so long they've probably all seen them now.

Reliability: I have no reason to suspect the Volt will be more or less reliable than the Prius, I am a bit concerned about how easy it seems the Prius likes to punch a hole in the side of the block. I've seen it on here a time or two but it's not something I have ever seen on other automotive forums unless they've done some serious modifications. And I will say in terms of my Prius, it has a terrible rattle from the rear hatch that developed much faster than any other vehicle I have owned but this is my first hatchback so maybe it's par for the course. Either way I'm disappointed in Toyota about it. Hopefully my dealer can have a look at it the next time it goes in.

 

I have a 10 kW EVSE that plugs into a 14-50 socket. It was not required for my use, but I wanted an installation safer than what an ad-hoc 120v use provides from a standard household socket, and the fast charge rate is a nice convenience for the ~ $500 I paid. I also wanted to contribute to the plug-share network.

 

What's this? Do you have it so any stranger can access your plug if you're not using it? Say I'm driving my leaf and low on juice for some reason, do I just pull up an app and say "hey! EV-ish is around the corner and says i can use it...." I zip over and plug in for a bit while you're at work?

 

What are you electricity costs ($/kWh) and gasoline costs ($/gallon)?

 

In spirit, yes; but since the EVSE is in the garage you have to contact me ahead of time so that someone is home. My Tele # and email are listed.

plugshare.com

 

What kind of flawed logic is this? You discount all the cost of obtaining gas (drilling, refining, transportation, etc....) but want to include the cost of generating electricity. That has nothing to do with the efficiency of a car. Based on your reasoning you never should have purchased a Prime since the electric miles are less efficient than the gas.